The Garden City Telegram

  Add Your Comment | Read (0) Comments

MARSHALL: The house that Vince built

Published 1/13/2012 in Sports

For most Kansas State University football historians, and yes, even some Kansas Jayhawk gridiron buffs, the news Wednesday of the death of Vince Gibson came with a mixture of emotions — sadness, admiration, respect.

For me, a Kansas graduate, remembering Gibson and his affable, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes obnoxious comments, brings back a ton of memories. Some good, some painful.

Gibson suffered through a painful year-long battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. It is a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement. ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, which took the life of the New York Yankee great, who was diagnosed in 1939 with the affliction and died in 1941.

I first met Gibson in the fall of 1972, when I was a junior at the University of Kansas and majoring in journalism. Memory can be a bit foggy, but I recall making the usual telephone inquiry to the K-State football office early the week of the KU-KSU game, scheduled that year on Oct. 14 in Manhattan, for an interview with Gibson.

He was his talkative self that day on the phone, but didn't provide any locker room quotes that would help the Jayhawks. I was only hoping for something like that.

The Jayhawks, with a talented quarterback of its own in David Jaynes, traveled to the Little Apple as a slight favorite over the Wildcats. Back then, the Sunflower rivalry was often the butt of jokes around the Big 8 Conference and elsewhere.

Such was the case in 1966 when the two schools battled to a 3-3 tie with missed field goals costing both teams chances to win. That led to the eventual dismissal of KSU coach Doug Weaver and KU coach Jack Mitchell. Enter Gibson and the bubbly Pepper Rodgers at KU.

Football tradition at both schools was simply a wishful thought. Kansas' 1969 appearance in the Orange Bowl was an aberration of an otherwise mediocre football program while K-State was mired in compiling perhaps the worst record in NCAA Division I annals.

But Gibson had arrived a few years earlier and breathed life into a moribund program. In his second season, KSU Stadium opened with a capacity of 35,000, a much improved version over the old Memorial Stadium capacity of just 20,000. Oldtimers will remember it next door to the venerable old Ahearn Field House, K-State's basketball home before Bramlage Coliseum was constructed.

Gibson, a native of Alabama, had gotten his early coaching career started in the South, where he eventually was an assistant at Florida State, his alma mater. He was in part responsible for bringing Bobby Bowden to Florida State. Prior to his hiring at K-State, Gibson was the defensive coordinator at Tennessee.

What most people today may fail to realize, or fail to remember, is that K-State's program in the mid 1960s was the worst in college football. The Wildcats had not had a single winning season since 1954, and it wasn't until 1970 when the 'Cats went 6-5 that Gibson produced his first season above .500.

That 1972 K-State team had lower expectations, and with a relatively unknown quarterback by the name of Dennis Morrison, entered the KU contest that October day with a 2-3 record. KU wasn't much better, owning a 2-2 record.

That game will not go down in history as the greatest game ever, but it may go down as one of the most exciting, most dramatic in the two schools' rivalry. With Kansas State leading 20-13, KU scored a late TD to make it 20-19 and the Jayhawks' Don Fambrough opted to go for a 2-point conversion to win the game. However, Jaynes was stopped on an ill-fated run around the left end, and the Wildcats' victory was preserved.

Or as the retired Lawrence Journal-World sports editor Chuck Woodling told me on the phone Thursday, "Jaynes was slower than molasses running uphill." Woodling said it was one of the worst calls he had seen in a more than 30-year writing career.

Gibson, whose trademark themes were "Purple Pride" and "we gonna win" seemed to be in full color that day. Woodling, though, said that what Gibson really said was, "We go' win," not "we gonna win."

"He was infectious, he breathed life into a pretty bad game," Woodling said. "There was no real rivalry until he showed up."

Two seasons later, Gibson would be on his way out at KSU. But what he did for Purple Pride and K-State football has been overshadowed by what Bill Snyder has accomplished since he arrived in 1989.

Only the old-timers can remember, though, that what K-State fans see today is truly the House that Vince Built.

Sports Editor Brett Marshall can be emailed at bmarshall@gctelegram.com

Welcome!    

Today's events • Weekly Events

Submit An Event